Bringing emotions out of the shadows: a symposium
Ulster Museum, 27 March 2014
Emotions and the pursuit of peace
Professor John D Brewer
Emotions are still in the shadows when it comes to peace processes and are mentioned in
the peace studies literature in largely routine ways, normally as part of a discussion of a
process or issue seen to be more important. Thus, emotions like anger, hatred and revenge
get raised in discussions of victims, shame-guilt in respect of restorative justice approaches
to ex-combatants, and fear, anxiety and distrust in relation to the problems of dealing with
the past.
This isolates specific emotions and tends to direct attention on what elsewhere I once
called ‘negative emotions’. The same emphasis is not placed on the corollary, what I once
called ‘positive emotions’, such as hope, forgiveness, compassion, empathy and tolerance.
While forgiveness has been isolated as one positive emotion in a significant set of literature,
it is invariably reduced to political forgiveness – forgiveness in the political realm – and
discussed by theologians. This means that it is not conceived outside the notion of Christian
eschatology, which makes it largely irrelevant to secular Westerners and to the majority of
the non-Christian Global South, precisely the places where conflict transformation is most
needed.
As an aside remark, I no longer find this distinction between negative and positive
emotions useful, precisely because I have problems with forgiveness and its connection to
the three types of anger that peace processes throw up. If I have time I will come back to
this. Rather than ‘negative’ and ‘positive’, I prefer instead, for reasons that will become clear,
to use past-focused and forward focused emotions.
In the chapter I devoted to emotions in my 2010 book on the sociology of peace
processes, I reflected a little on this obsession with what I still believed then were negative
emotions, most notably the focus on shame-guilt, and also began to chart a sociological
approach to hope and to forgiveness. But I have to admit that emotions are my own
1
shadowlands, for I have not given them much attention in my work since, which has been
mostly on religious peacebuilding.
Therefore, in returning to emotions today, I want to do something different. I have
five arguments:
a) There are different stages to a peace process and emotions can occur as an issue
quite differently in each.
b) Specific emotions need to be isolated as of particular concern at different stages in
the peace process.
c) The same emotions recur time after time but their socio-political implications and
consequences change as the circumstances of their expression change.
d) Peace processes highlight that emotions are performed behaviours and the sociopolitical setting of their performance changes their impact and significance.
e) Peace processes show that a sociological approach to emotions is quite different to
that of psychology, but equally illuminating, for it looks at the socio-political settings in
which emotions become inhibitors or enablers to peace, and the social policy
responses that facilitate this.
In twenty or so minutes I can do no more than sketch this approach, and leave you
dissatisfied with the detail.
There are I think three stages to a process of conflict transformation and emotions
impact on them differently.

The emotions aroused during the conflict by the violence itself, emotions which are
left as a legacy of the violence and which need to be managed in the peace
negotiation phase.

The emotions aroused by the idea of peace itself and the emotional adjustments
which either non-violence or dramatically reduced levels of violence provoke during
the post-conflict phase.

The emotions invoked by having to learn to live together in tolerance, either for the
first time or after a long time, once the conflict is over.
Fear, mistrust, anger, revenge, hate, hope, empathy – these emotions are all part of the
problem protagonists bring to the table when discussing a peace settlement; and some
cause negotiators problems in trying to convince the protagonists to stay at the table. Not
2
many political scientists would accept this but managing the emotional dynamics of
peace discussions is as important as the political deals they discuss.
One of the features that is forgotten in conflict transformation is that peace itself
comes with an emotional cost. I mean more than the suffering people endured so that others
can experience the benefits of peace – the grief, depression, suicidal feelings, and feelings
of loss and pain that victims and survivors live with daily. There is, however, something even
more emotionally powerful than this. People have to recalibrate who the enemy is and thus
reassess their own identity in relation to those who perhaps for a very long time have been
considered outsiders. Peace itself can cause a whole range of emotions – fear, anxiety,
suspicion, mistrust – in response to this ontological readjustment.
But peace also causes three particular emotional responses that deserve more
attention by peace analysts:
a) bystander guilt (the guilt feelings amongst those who stood by and did nothing
actively for peace)
b) perpetrator guilt (the feelings of remorse amongst those who participated in the
violence)
c) guilt denial (forms of justification and normalisation that declare there is nothing to be
remorseful for, the very expression of which often leads to emotional responses and
reactions from others).
There are more ontological problems with the idea of peace I am sure, but these three
emotional responses to the very idea of peace need to be brought to the light.
It should be clear by now that the same emotions recur in peace – fear, guilt, anger,
anxiety, revenge, hate; rarely hope, tolerance, forgiveness, empathy, compassion,
compromise and the like. Why? It is because the different stages peace processes go
through isolate past-focused emotions in ways that reinforce their prominence in
public debate. Debate about the legacy of the conflict will always emerge in the post-conflict
phase, giving the past an unwarranted role as the arbiter of the future. Discussions about
the past are backward looking, so that emotions that might direct society’s attention to the
future – what I call future-focused emotions, like hope, empathy, tolerance, compassion –
3
are made secondary to those emotions provoked by discussions of the morality of the past,
which is why I call them past-focused emotions. Fear, mistrust, revenge, anger, hate
become the currency, and those groups most likely to feel, express and perform these
emotions, are the stakeholders who are given public attention. It is for this reason that
debates about emotions are usually coupled with debates about victims/survivors.
These legacy issues have an impact on the emotional repertoire of people living in
societies emerging out of conflict. In isolating and prioritising this narrow range of pastfocused emotions post-conflict societies tend to see the future through the eyes of
those who suffered most in the past not through the perspective of generations yet
unborn. This has the effect of making the task of learning to live together in tolerance as
difficult a stage in peace processes as conflict transformation itself. Emotions complicate
the process of social transformation as much as the process of conflict
transformation.
I am not sure policy-makers, civil servants and post-conflict politicians responsible for
implementing and facilitating a shared society actually realise this. Learning to live together
in tolerance is not instrumental but value oriented, cultural and symbolic not political and
economic. If money alone solved peace processes, then Northern Ireland would be the most
peaceful place this side of heaven, for the finances thrown at its social transformation by the
USA, Europe and the Irish and British governments surpass the Gross Domestic Product of
many countries in the Global South.
Values, culture and symbols invoke emotions in the way instrumental policy
decisions do not. This means that post-conflict societies that are learning to live together in
tolerance need to give attention to the emotional repertoire that undergirds such tolerance.
What are the emotional inhibitors and the emotional enablers that affect peace? I ask
that question knowing fully that it is not a question that is even posed let alone has answers.
This is yet more reason why emotions need to emerge from the shadows in peace
processes. Academics need to shine the light here to assist practitioners understand the
answer. I hesitate to suggest I have it, but I am sure of one thing – we need to promote
4
discussion of the beneficial effects of forward-focused emotions like hope, forgiveness,
empathy, compassion, compromise. Only then can academics alert policy makers, civil
servants and politicians to the sorts of policies and policy choices that enable, encourage
and promote emotional responses that help us learn to live together.
I would like to take a moment to talk about anger. Peace processes often provide no
appropriate cultural space for expressions of people’s anger, grief, loss, pain and suffering.
The moral obligation placed upon people to ‘forgive’, to ‘move on’, to ‘put the past behind
them’, means these cultural spaces are few, especially in the public sphere. This is because
‘anger’ is thought of as dysfunctional to peace, and often in public space we see too much of
it in post-conflict societies. But this is anger of the wrong kind. We need to distinguish three
types of anger relevant to peace processes:
a) righteous anger (justified and merited but expressed and enacted within fairness
rules that are orientated to its effects on others)
b) self-righteous anger (justified and merited but expressed and enacted without
fairness rules so that it is self-oriented)
c) unrighteous anger (unjustified and unmerited but expressed and enacted regardless).
Righteous anger is functional in peace processes; it’s self- and un-righteous anger that give
us the problem. And in as much as the moral obligation to forgive squeezes the cultural
space for the expression and enactment of righteous anger, I think that forgiveness can be
dysfunctional too.
I know I have not covered everything I set out to do in this half hour, but I need to
conclude. And I want to do so by drawing your attention to the way I as a sociologist see and
understand emotions. Emotions are obviously raw feelings. But raw feelings need not be
enacted in behaviour. We can act in ways contrary to how we feel. We can, for example,
pretend an emotion or disguise an emotion. That is to say, the public performance of our
emotions can be detached from our raw feelings. Waiters and waitresses, air hostesses and
air stewards, married couples, even audiences in overly long and complicated lectures are
5
amongst those who do it all the time. Sociologists see emotions as artful behaviour,
performed behaviour, decoupled from raw feelings.
What this means for peace processes is that people need to be encouraged to
perform in public feelings that they might not have in private – even which they disavow
in the private sphere – but which perform, enact and encode in language and behaviour
forward-focused emotions like tolerance, hope, forgiveness, compassion, compromise and
empathy. Put bluntly: there should be a culture of tolerance, civility and respect in the public
sphere in peace processes that is adhered to irrespective of what our feelings are in private.
And this is why emotions need to come out from the shadows. Academics need to
understand what these forward-focused emotions consist of as performative and linguistic
codes and share it publicly. Civil society needs to participate in their performance, especially
here in Northern Ireland civil society groups like the churches, the parading organisations
and the paramilitary groups, and politicians need to develop policies that support rather than
undermine them. Is this likely? No. But then I am a jaundiced realist. Does this make
emotions too important to be left to psychologists alone? Yes. But then I am a sociologist.
Thank you.
6